Does the code for these drivers come directly from Matrox (the readme.txt seems to suggest so?)

Is there any relation or cooperation between tuxx-home.at and the maintainers of the official Xorg mga driver? The xorg git repository seems to be pretty far behind, very few commits during the last year. Are there any current attempts to bring the Xorg driver and the "unofficial" driver in sync?

Does the code for these drivers come directly from Matrox (the readme.txt seems to suggest so?)

Yes.

Is there any relation or cooperation between tuxx-home.at and the maintainers of the official Xorg mga driver?

No. I think they don't like me very much, because we are heading towardstwo different ways of driver development. The Xorg staff tries to make all functions open source (which is good, BTW) and will drop the hal support in the near future completely out of their driver. The hal moduleis currently necessary for some basic features, like DVI support, secondhead on certain cards, hardware acceleration, special modelines, etc.and they try to rebuild these functionalities as open source.

Once they are ready, there won't be any need for unofficial Matrox driversanymore but until they've finished their work, there are some things thatrequire the unofficial driver.

The xorg git repository seems to be pretty far behind, very few commits during the last year. Are there any current attempts to bring the Xorg driver and the "unofficial" driver in sync?

No. I once tried to sync them but it's hard work since they renamed most of the variables and definitions, function headers, etc. to be differentfrom the official Matrox driver and therefore most of the work will haveto be done by hand without easy patching.

No. The latest official mga driver from Matrox is 4.4 and the unofficial
releases are subversions of these official versions, e.g. the first unofficial
release was 4.4.1. If Matrox will ever release 4.5, the next unofficial
release will be 4.5.1.

I don't know for sure to what versioning scheme the Xorg mga maintainers
adhere, you'll have to ask them for an appropriate answer

The Matrox 4.5 driver series will, supposedly, move to 100% open-source code. Do you know of anyone who is synchronizing either your driver or the X.ORG driver and plans to adopt those changes? If all this is being done to avoid the HAL, what does this mean for future driver development?

Do you know of anyone who is synchronizing either your driver or the X.ORGdriver and plans to adopt those changes?

No, I don't know of anyone doing such a job. The main reason for this maybethat the two approaches are way to different. I'm trying to use the officialdriver provided as is by Matrox and simply adding compatibility features andminor bugfixes. The Xorg crew tries to replace the HAL library etc. completelyand therefore they're currently missing some features the (un)officialdriver has.

If 4.5 will really be 100% open source, the Xorg mga driver will likelydie because the only reason why it is currently available is due to thereason that 4.4 is partly closed source.

If all this is being done to avoid the HAL, what does this mean for future driver development?

That means that future driver development will be much more funny than
it is now.